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This operation appeared to me to be the most laborious species of work performed in Typee; and had I possessed a sufficient intimacy with the language to have conveyed my ideas upon the subject, I should certainly have suggested to the most influential of the natives the expediency of establishing a college of vestals to be centrally located in the valley, for the purpose of keeping alive the indispensable article of fire; so as to supersede the necessity of such a vast outlay of strength and good temper, as were usually squandered on these occasions.
As they threaded the corridors, they heard, at first far off, then closer and closer, the sound of a child wailing, bawling, blubbering. Even in the Palace, Campia was an irrepressible cry-baby. In the chapel of the Statue of Victory they found the Vestals, the Empress and the Emperor. "I've got it safe," Brinnaria proclaimed.
Only a little glint on the ground now and then. Some one is creeping along the wall to enter the house of the Vestals!" "I see nothing," confessed Agias, rubbing his eyes. "You are no sailor; look harder. I can count four men in the gloom. They are stealing up to the gate of the building. Is your sword ready? Now "
A cloth was lowered over the opening. I only heard, a few moments later, imprecations and piercing shrieks, mingled with mournful moans, from women, who were crying in Gallic: "Death, death, but not disgrace!" "Those timorous fools are playing the vestals, because they are stripped naked to be shown to the customers," said the "horse-dealer," who had kept near me.
Yet we find ladies constantly choosing to make their mental mediocrity more conspicuous by clothing it in a masquerade of ancient names; by putting their feeble sentimentality into the mouths of Roman vestals or Egyptian princesses, and attributing their rhetorical arguments to Jewish high-priests and Greek philosophers.
Their stately progress through the streets, gazed at and pointed at by the admiring crowds, was conducive to high spirits. Still more so was it to be ushered obsequiously through cool corridors and up carpeted stairs to the Vestals' private loge, a roomy space immediately to the right of the imperial pavilion.
She was not dreaming now, but she knew instinctively how it had been in those last days of the Vestals' existence, and wished every pillar, and angle, and cornice, and ornament back, each into its own place and unchanged, and herself, where she was, in full consciousness of life and thought, at the very moment when she had first seen the man's face and had understood that one may vow away the dying body but not the deathless soul.
Strangest of all was the procession on the Ides of May, the fifteenth of that month, when the Pontiffs and the Vestals came to the bridge in solemn state, with men who bore thirty effigies made of bulrushes in likeness to men's bodies, and threw them into the river, one after the other, with prayers and hymns; but what the images meant no man knows.
Then they wound him in a sheet, and sitting on horses which were waiting, hurried to Ostia, where they threw the body into the sea. Poppæa, not finding the virgo magna, who with other vestals was at the house of Vatinius, returned soon to the Palatine.
"I have noticed, friend Kennedy," said he, "that when I want information over any point you are not always so ready to supply it." "When did you ever ask me anything that I did not tell you? You remember, for example, my giving you the material for your paper about the temple of the Vestals." "Ah, well, that was not a matter of much importance.
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